These datacenters will likely be hastily abandoned once the AI-flavored expansion pops and will be a blight on the land that would have otherwise been growing beans and corn.
At best, they will be a poorly guarded structure that local high school students will break into and do what high school students do.
Nearly half of all corn fields in the US go to feed our cars.
25% of a massive number is still a massive number.
> Because of provisions in the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 that permits farmers to make their own crop planting decisions based on the most profitable crop for a given year, corn acreage in the United States has increased from a Government-mandated low of 60.2 million planted acres in 1983 to close to or exceeding 90 million since 2018. Much of this growth in area and production is a result of expanding ethanol production, which now accounts for nearly 45 percent of total corn use.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...
It does look like its dropped a bit since that time though.
Still, one wonders if we'd bother with so much of our fields going to grow corn if the main use was just DDGS. I wonder how the economics of everything else in the corn industry would change if we stopped requiring E10.